"View: Toggle Editor Area Visibility" -- Sizing Issues

Support Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Using keyboard shortcuts to save space on screen, I can hide the left sidebar, the right side secondary sidebar ‘pane’ or ‘panel’ area, the right side ‘agents’ sidebar, I can CMD+Shift+E to show my file in the browser, or CMD+Shift+S to view my changes in source control view.

As of a few days ago, I started using CMD+Option+E to toggle the editor area (because I don’t tend to use it very much anymore)

I noticed that it seems to have unintended sizing changes – it changes the width of the left sidebar, and when the editor section is restored via toggling, it restores with a really small width, not the original untoggled width

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Assign 'View: Toggle Editor Area Visibility" to a hotkey
  2. Use 'View: Toggle Editor Area Visibility" hotkey (with a left sidebar and right pane open – most common usecase especially on a laptop)
  3. Notice the left sidebar shrank in width, unexpectedly
  4. Use 'View: Toggle Editor Area Visibility" hotkey again
  5. Notice as the editor section re-appears, it’s now an incredibly small, unusable width

Expected Behavior

  • The sidebar size should remain untouched
  • The editor panel should come back at it’s original size / percent of the window width

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

Version: 2.5.20
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 511523af765daeb1fa69500ab0df5b6524424610
Date: 2026-02-19T20:41:31.942Z (3 days ago)
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 39.4.0
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.22.0
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.6.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

3

Hey, thanks for the detailed report and the screen recording.

This looks like a known layout issue where panel widths aren’t saved or restored correctly when you toggle visibility. The team is aware. No ETA yet, but your report helps us prioritize it.

Let me know if you notice anything else related to this.

6

Great, sounds good

The default tab management could use some work (editor as the starting location), and the terminology could be consolidated (secondary side bar, auxiliaryBar, pane/panel)

I primarily need ways to jump between the file browser/editor and the agent/terminal. Haven’t seen a standalone window option, so I’m looking at toggling each section and navigating tabs within each side. There are keyboard shortcuts for this, and the main “when” condition is auxiliaryBarFocus.

Current thinking is to override Control+` (similar to CMD+`)

7

For anyone else waiting for a legitimate fix, a workaround is to hide the sidebar first, mess with whats visible, then show the sidebar. This command is a bit of a hack but works well enough for me:


  {
    "key": "ctrl+`",
    "command": "runCommands",
    "args": {
      "commands": [
        "workbench.action.toggleSidebarVisibility",
        "workbench.action.toggleAuxiliaryBar",
        "workbench.action.toggleEditorVisibility",
        "workbench.action.toggleSidebarVisibility"
      ]
    }
  },

Currently (based on implementation details – cant toggle editor if theres no sidebar nor aux bar) if starting in split view, this will expand the editor view to full screen first.

Subsequently (normally) this command just toggles between “sidebar + full screen editor” and “sidebar + full screen aux bar”

9

Hey, that runCommands chain workaround is awesome, thanks for sharing it. I’m sure it’ll help other users too.

The bug is still on our radar. We’ll post an update here once there’s a fix.